@aerilius said:

Personally I don't see a reason for the "versus". One could see it the way that the world of God(s/etc.) encloses the world of science, but not vice versa.

But on the contrary, through science we can find why people tend to make up gods and why they feel good when they believe in them. Through neuroscience we can see that we feel good about prepositions that we believe are true, but the bigger mystery remains- how can we sometimes have two prepositions that we believe are true yet they contradict each other. Why do people often instinctively favor religious ideas instead of the scientific truth.
Most of the answers for the biggest questions of life lie inside our brain. We just have to keep looking.

As for the people who do not believe in the literal meaning of their doctrine- I think they are just wishful thinkers who just haven't found spiritual fulfilment outside religion yet. I also was struggling for a long time to reach this state. One of the last obstacle in my way was the question of morality. Once I found the answer, I felt as everything was in it's place and my life has found it's meaning, I finally felt... happy

Happy new year everyone! I wish you found this happyness I have this year!

Just found a nice site with responses to common theist arguments, provided with a lot of reference material http://whynogod.wordpress.com/

What do you think, does an absolute morality exists outside of religion?
I started to think about this after I watched the debate by Sam Harris and William Lane Craig - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqaHXKLRKzg The main thought I understood from Harris was that you can't find absolute morality in any cultural context, but it is something that we strive for when trying to achieve the maximum well-being and flourishment of a society, so therefor the moral standards in any society would naturally evolve towards an objective standard for it to strive and survive.

Can the human species reach this understanding of absolute morality or will we just destroy ourselves before we do it?

I just wanted to ask how many hours are left

Thanks for the good news

Here is a video from scepticon about the historical Jesus. Mostly clearing some facts about the gospel one. This will probably be an eye-opener for some and it really was for me, since I too once believed he was such a well known fellow at that time. Now, at best I think he could have been a wise preacher that got crucified...
http://www.youtube.com/user/HamboneProductions?feature=watch#p/search/0/MvleOBYTrDE

Boofredlay

You have your right to be insulted, but all I'm saying is you communicate with words that have no meaning to others and it is like talking in a foreign language with a theist. You try to refute my argument about love, yet you fail to give your own definition of the word.

The article doesn't need to prove anything, it states the facts about how we get the emotions that we associate with being in love, so when examining someone- their brain activity or hormone levels, we could find that they are similar to a person that is in love. Or do you only find a poetic meaning to that word?

I don't necessarily think you blindly follow by the book. I just wanted to hear your position on this. Everyone just claims to have his own unique relationship with god and it is never clear to me what they actually believe.

Boofredlay

Nope, I still cant find logic in what you say. Your examples seem backward and your conclusion makes no sense to me.
If you can't relate to non-believers with terms outside your personal reality, then how could we ever come to a common conclusion?

You say you can't prove love, but can you define it? Can you prove something that is undefinable? What is the point of doing so then?

Here is the first article I could find about the scientific explanation of love:
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/articles/article/clairemcloughlincolumn1.htm/
I believe there are tons of peer reviewed scientific articles out there that explain love in other ways, but do you ever look for them? Or are you just satisfied with the impermeable truth your faith provides?

@unknownuser said:

Measuring hormone levels or chemical reactions to prove love is a flawed arguement. For example: if your leg is severed in a car accident your body chemicals change drastically. Does this mean you no longer love? I don't believe it does.

I don't quite understand your example, wouldn't the agonizing pain just overcome other emotions? Wouldn't an adrenalin rush be more useful for your survival then some emphatic feelings for your crashed car? How about the cases when you have an amnesia, you can lose all your memories, emphatic feelings, emotions and "the spiritual bounds" that connect you with your loved ones to the point that they seem like complete strangers to you. Does your soul have an amnesia too?

How do you recognize that someone is in love then? Do we look for Cupids arrow up their ass and the butterflies? How could you prove that someone else is in love if he does not admit it?

What if we observe a thousand couples that say their in love and analyse their brain activity at their reunion and when meeting a complete stranger. If after these observations you can spot a common and consistent pattern for the different cases, then can you conclude that certain patterns in the brain activity can be linked to hormone level change and appearance of certain emotions like love?

If this research is consistent with a thousand more from many fields of science and is successfully repeated by others, then why would anyone still believe in any superstitious answers if science can give you a rational explanation?

Or I may just gather information about my hormone levels, and make a detailed analysis of the many chemical reactions in my brain that caused the emotion you call love. But I'm neither a scientist or am I qualified to do so. I don't see the sense for me to attempt to trivialize the cause of such a complex emotion when there is already scientific research done in this field. Again we come to the question that we may understand the word love differently, and even if I'd give you a perfectly good scientific explanation, should you care if you only believed in the spiritual meaning of love?

@unknownuser said:

I don't see members turning against each other, I see a passionate discussion.

Well then lets try to keep this passion only inside the corner bar.

@unknownuser said:

I often ask myself, if God knows all things, past, present and future then where does my free will stand.

How do you understand the concept of free will then? Does it even have to exist for our lives to be as they are?

I personally don't believe in any deity or other sorts of superstition, just because of simple logic:
-I have never encountered such things and I find a great deal of consistency in the way science shows the origin of our existence and simply said: it works
-All arguments I have seen for the existence of the supernatural have been successfully refuted
-I have always found a reasonable answer for anything I don't know yet once I have searched for it.

I believe theists trust lies in a similar logic, but the part that is different is the criteria in witch they judge evidence and how they understand the meaning of words. So basically most rational discussions just end with an agreement of a disagreement with the conclusion that the existence of a deity or a supernatural phenomenon can't be proven by evidence that is approved by the other or explained in words without distorting others accepted meaning of them.
You can't convince another if you don't have a common ground to stand on. So if one claims there is a god then he must be prepared to defend his belief in a court of law and by applying the scientific method. This attempt has failed countless times already. On the other hand, if one wants to prove there is no god, then he must be prepared to fight in the imaginary realm of religion, where the rules of logic and reason do not apply, rendering the discussion itself a pointless task of mental masturbation.

Some questions discussed here are nicely summed up in quotes of Victor J Stenger in this site
http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/quotes/stenger.htm

It kind of hurts to see so many of our forum members turning against each other because of such a stupid subject matter like this, so I would like to guide you to a speech by Christopher Hitchens, a truly great man who just recently passed away, that tells about the discussions that we really have worth having.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgIcJb8i4m8

The main idea is that the eye is drawn to the highest contrast points that help to distinguish the most important parts of the image. You could also replace the vignette with a drop shadow from a trees and also add some trees in the reflection to balance out the image.

The water needs a bump. The render is not bad, but the image looks very flat. I tried to play around in photoshop and improve the tonal and color contrast. Made some color balance, level and hue changes. Also added a background, slight haze and a vignette to bring the image to life

Here is the actual model in Lightup

And a short animation of it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdVy3r1uLt4

Lightup really has improved a lot since the early releases

@jason_maranto said:

To create a more opaque "AGS" simply use a default character type with a low opacity set (for the SketchUp material) -- if you want it to look dirty use an image (for the SketchUp material) and set the opacity low. There is some tweaking you will have to do to find your personal "sweet-spot" for materials.

Thanks

I just had a doh moment when I opened the material editor and tried to scale it up. I finally found the long lost material opacity slider

I got the glass I wanted but whenever I use the AGS preset, the result is always the same, even when I change the opacity.

Hey! I would like some crits on the render I'm making.
I'm using the maxwell plugin, but I cant find out how to make a tinted glass or how to make it look dirty. The problem is that if you use a Glass preset, the material wont let the light through and the AGS materials transparency is too big. I have also failed to find a MXM that would fit my needs.

Some things that I already noticed: reducing the sun power and increasing the exposure would get rid of the burned areas to achieve a more natural effect and a ceiling light in the kitchen is necessary. Also I just noticed the cabinet color is wrong and the pillows beg for a texture.

The image was rendering for 10 hours for 20 passes
I'm going to have to draw the same image in a one point perspective, so that's the reason for the composition.

Edit: damn... I just noticed the maximum resolution set in fire does not override the maximum set in the scene manager. I thought the scene manager only set the aspect ratio.

Thank you Jason!

I couldn't resist to buy maxwell in the end.
Is it possible that I cant register to the forum because of gateway access problems?

Wasn't there a 10Gb/day download limit for free accounts for dropbox?

Thanks.

I was wondering why does the MXM material appear as a bump map and not as a diffuse map in the Sketchup viewport?
The plugin looks excellent, but the only thing that holds me back from purchasing it right now is the inability to work with render channels.
Is that a marketing strategy from Next Limit to lure more people into buying the standalone version, or are there some restrictions that don't allow the incorporation of some features in the plugin for Sketchup?

How long were the render times for the interiors/exteriors, and on what hardware were they rendered on? What are maxwell's plans for future updates for the plugin?

TIG, a circle in one point perspective would be a deformed ellipse. So then you should either find a way to deform it to match the middle points of the edges( see red dots) or use a spline that can form this ellipse by using the middle construction points. I'll try to find some sort of bezier spline that can do the last then if nothing better comes in mind.
That would be just what mitcorb suggested but I'm just not sure of the precision of this approach.

Well.. you couldn't ever draw a perfect circle in perspective by hand because the techniques available for drawing them just give you guidelines anyway, but given the circumstances that the work must be done in CAD, without making any real 3d objects, the best bet would be to use minor cheats to achieve a perfect one point perspective drawing that can not be made in real life.

I could, but this would be very time consuming and once you need a lot of them, a more automated approach would be preferred.
I guess I could just try to avoid circles at all costs

I think the best solution would be to find a script that allows me to quickly draw it in 3d space. It should work in these steps

1. set the first point
2. set the diameter
3. set vanishing point

But obviously I lack the knowledge to make this myself. Would it be hard to script something like this for Autocad?

Hey.

I have been given a task to draw a one point perspective interior, but with a point made that if we make it in CAD, then we must not use any of the 3d functions and everything must be constructed in the same way as when doing it by hand. The thing that bothers me is that I can't find a way to accuratly construct a circle in a one point perspective. So does anyone have a trick for this?